Agreed, this is truly shocking behavior on their part.

1) They do the same thing. When I have the google toolbar installed and use bing, my clickstream data goes to Google.

2) On a micro level, there is nothing wrong with this at all.

Of course, on a macro level, both sites trample all over user privacy, so you should be using DDG.

To the defenders of Bing - would it be ok if Bing similarly used visits to amazon.com and various URL parameters to reimplement their "bestselling" lists for each category? I'm sure they could, and it seems clearly unethical. They are doing the same to google, right?

you still didn't get it, they are using clickstream from every possible source from amazon to ebay to google. and there is nothing unethical about it, as it just gives them annonymous data about which site people are clicking to. Google gets the same data from google toolbar and other products.

I think there's a very clear ethical divide.

Using any Google product, you implicitly agree to them, in exchange, using your data. That's how Google works, and has always worked. That's your payment for using the service.

With Windows - the operating system that you are using - it's an entirely different proposition. For one, you've already paid for it. And secondly, you don't expect the software that you bought to spy on you and give away links you were clicking on in a Google search results page.

Links in a Bing search - sure! That's how search engines work. But tracking my clicks on any other web page, by my OS, that's spyware, plain and simple.

Google clearly stated in their blog post they used IE8 and the Bing toolbar with settings that provide user experience data to MS (for the Suggested Sites feature and such). I'm sure Google's toolbar and Chrome phone home if you let them, too.

Unless I'm missing something just running Windows isn't enough for MS to do the kind of data collection Google is claiming.

You fail to understand the issue here. None of this stuff is on by default in Windows. You have to install the Bing toolbar.

I doubt the debate would get this nuanced, but I believe Google only tracks users on their own site. It appears Microsoft is tracking click across at least one search engine.

I think this distinction has legal as well as technical implications.

This is factually incorrect. The google toolbar records clickstream data across all sites*

* all with some specific exceptions for perhaps SSL and locally-resolved zones, or something like that.

Fair enough, but the ethical thing is for Google to exclude bing.com from the clickstream analysis, and I hope they have.

The big search engines are large enough to show up clearly in any of their competitors statistics (and there are always human teams monitoring the automated process) and should specifically exclude data from their competitors.

For Google to use Bing clickstream or vice versa also perpetuates a vicious circle where bad results from one search engines will spread among the others.

Bing either hasn't acted ethically, or hasn't though through the consequences of absorbing clickstreams of competitors' sites.

Yes. And Bing toolbar does just the same. And when those clickstreams are used as one signal of link relevancy, you get the exact behaviour they are describing on the google blog.

Thanks for pointing that out. Much Appreciated!

This whole accusation by Google was very childish... and I thought adult supervision was no longer required at Google ;)

Would a lawsuit be better? I think that this is a better problem to be sorted outside of the courts. Too often we rely on courts to solve our problems.